Mortgage Renewing This Year? Why More People Are Shopping the Market

2026 is a record year for mortgage renewals. Ron Butler explains why Canadians are shopping around more than ever.

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 Renewals are a little bit different matter. In Canada, most Canadians have just kept dealing with whatever institution they initially went with on renewal. Is that shifting at all where people are going to the broker and starting to shop the market on renewal more?

There’s no question because we are in a unique situation, a large number. This is the biggest year for renewals in the history of Canada. There are more renewals taking place in 2026. By the way, 2025 was very big, but 2026 is the most renewals that have ever been processed in the history of this country.

So there’s a big feature to that. For a big chunk of those people, they’re going from a 1.79, 1.89 mortgage rate. To a 3.99. And I’ll tell you what, that kind of an increase in rate will get everybody’s attention.

Like bigly, like they’re paying attention. So we are seeing more shopping today by, uh, mortgage clients than we’ve ever seen.

I mean, there is a sensitivity to this increase and people, so awareness has grown that there are other options. That there are options and that they should shop. I mean, it’s probably taken 30 years, but I would say the idea of shopping your renewal has finally reached a point where it’s way over half of all, of all mortgage renewals.

That’s it. I didn’t realize it was that higher percentage.

I did not realize it was that big a percentage.

Oh yeah, when your interest rate doubles, you will become very interested in it.